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Thursday, February 21, 2008

It's this Sunday?

This morning, as I was getting dressed and putting away the laundry that should have been put away a few days ago, I learned, to my surprise, that the Academy Awards are this Sunday.

Who knew??

There have been times in my life when I have been keenly interested in the Academy Awards. The year that Gandhi and E.T. (1982) were both nominated for best picture comes to mind. I had seen Gandhi because Mrs. Alderson had promised us extra-credit if we saw it and drew a picture depicting what we felt about and/or learned from the movie. I had really connected with the film, and I remember wanting it to beat out E.T. with the kind of desperation that only an eleven-year old girl can muster. Naturally, I was thrilled when I learned the next morning (having been made to go to bed before the award was made the night before) that it had won for Best Picture. That I would care so much about it seems kind of odd to me now.

Then there were the Theo years. For awhile before I fell for Eric, I dated another stellar-but-ultimately-not-exactly-right-for-me-(nor-I-for-him) guy. Among other things, he was very much into the Academy Awards. He would follow all the pre-Oscar award shows, speculate (with his family members primarily) about which films would be nominated, see as many of the shows that were nominated as he could get to, and just generally revel in the events surrounding the Oscar season. I would go to some of the films with him, and usually watch the awards ceremony with his family. It was a fun time, and I enjoyed my new-found (albeit limited) knowledge of this aspect of pop culture.

Now though, I'm back to my old oblivious ways. As I was listening to the radio report this morning, I didn't hear a single movie mentioned that I had seen, and only one of them (Juno) that I had even heard of. While I'm a little surprised by this, it doesn't really bother me. They are just movies after all, right? We find different interests at different points in our lives. Some interests (like religion, family, and chocolate) will surely stay with me forever, while others (calligraphy, racquetball, and reading everything at my local library written by Orson Scott Card) have and will continue to fade.

And (as we hear in Forest Gump, a movie I didn't love but that won the 1994 Academy Award for best picture anyway,) that's all I have to say about that.

Forrest Gump is my all time favorite movie soundtrack, closely followed by the Cutting Edge. I've never much been into the academy awards, not since Silence of the Lambs made best movie. That movie totally creeped me out and I realized the academy awards were about rewarding great film, not necessarily movies that will enrich your life.